> I forgot the fact power failures only happen in Texas
No, but only Texas repeatedly ignored federal advice to fix their power grid which directly resulted in children literally freezing to death.
Texas's state government is too focused on insane abortion laws and locking down a ruling white minority class through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and empowering election officials to throw out election results.
If you're worried about freezing to death the Northeast is definitely not the place to go. Far more people die from hypothermia in the Northeast every year than in Texas, even without having a massive pretty much unprecedented storm. And yes, this storm in February was way worse than the storm a decade ago.
I do agree with you though about the priorities of the Texas government. I don't agree with and vote against a lot of those idiots.
Curious, do you use typespecs and dialyzer? If so, how do you find it?
Elixir checks pretty much every box I'd want in a language, but after dealing with nil in Ruby for years and having fun with TypeScript... I'm feeling more drawn to working with type systems.
I find working with nil in Elixir to be quite reasonable. One way in which elixir is different is that you have different operators for when it must be boolean, and nil is not tolerated for those operators (and vs &&). This coupled with the convention of using ? at the end of functions which emit boolean makes things easier.
The one thing I wish is that people stopped writing boolean functions with is_ in front (that is supposed to be only for guards, but not everyone follows that convention).
If you want type systems, you can probably work with Gleam, in the future, I imagine there could be great interop where you can just drop in a .gleam file in your elixir code base with zero hassle attached, and have parts of your code base that are completely type safe, and let Elixir handle all the risks of IO and other effects.
I'm not a huge fan of Dialyzer myself. I would put it strongly in the "much better than nothing" category rather than the "usable and useful type system" category. I always write specs for my functions and types, and while they sometimes catch bugs, they're not quite as expressive as I would like them to be.
I suppose you could write Elixir in a style that was more type safe by writing in a less polymorphic or recursive style, but the language does not lend itself well to it. Structs and maps are mostly fine, discriminated unions less so.
Answering from similar experience. I personally use them both, dialyzer as part of the Elixir Language Server and typespecs when I feel something needs more clarity and definition.
Depending on what itches your types scratch for you it might be enough, might not. I've never wanted more type system in my Elixir personally.
I generally verify types only at the boundaries of my application (or very critical modules) using norm[1].
Either you have a strict type system that does not have an "any" type (yes, I'm looking at you Typescript), or you have a flexible type system like Python/Erlang/Elixir and you do runtime type checking whenever it's needed.
I'm writing more Typescript code than I would in Javascript for almost no type safety benefits (but for documentation, it's awesome).
Dialyzer and typespecs are better than nothing but not with much because they can introduce a lot of friction along the way, for not much benefit.
As another poster said, it can catch the very occasional potential bug but to me at least it's rarely worth the hassle.
I miss static typing after I got back to Elixir from Rust but the BEAM will likely never be statically typed.
To that end, I found utilizing metaprogramming to generate normal and property tests to be much more productive use of my time, with a measurable impact to boot.
Neither is people piling on the maintainer of Babel based on GitHub activity and someone essentially accusing them of embezzlement. Sorry if that makes me upset.
$130k for a senior developer in the United States is nothing. People at FANG are making 3-4x that annually.
open source maintainer salary !== FAANG total comp package
E5 engineers at FB are making an avg 200k base [1]. That is not that far off what you would expect the difference to be between open source maintainer and senior engineer at Facebook.
That is not 3-4x. Even if you include stock, that will put the FB eng around 350k. You may have an argument for the 2-3x range but basically only at the very top level companies and senior roles, not mid level contributors. And by including stock or other forms of TC besides base, you begin inflating the impression of cash flow. Stock grants don’t land in your wallet like paychecks do. Your QoL or vested net worth will take time to be impacted. It’s not like all of a sudden you can now afford X% more in your daily life.
I agree that 2-3x is more appropriate. Either way, don't you think the maintainer of Babel could easily be making more money and doing easier work (individual contributor at some large org)?
The accusations that this person is freeloading off of Babel donations seem absurd (especially when you consider who is making them). The babel maintainer could be coasting at a large engineering organization with a lot less responsibility is what I am getting at it. It's exactly what the creator did...
I was solely commenting on the SV compensation point, but yes, you’re totally right that he could be doing less work for significantly more money elsewhere. The accusations are unjust for sure. IMO less because of the salary numbers and more because commit count is simply not a good measure of employee performance.
It seems a common trend that software engineers think their high salaries are something they can take for granted forever.
I prefer to think that we are riding in a bubble that can pop any minute now. This line of thinking allows me to be more responsible with spending and save more for rainy days.
Good thinking - those of us with some grey in our hair remember when coming out of college with a CS degree into a $45-50k government contracting gig was cause for celebration rather than disappointment, after watching our slightly older friends take loans for Porsches on their snazzy dot-com salaries... and then struggle with the fallout a year or two later when said dot-coms drastically cut staff or disappeared entirely.
Of course, it's not a joke of a salary in the United States. Is $130k a joke of a salary for an NBA player even though it's 90th percentile? Context matters.
$130k is barely over the median pay for a Senior Software Engineer in the United States. A lot of the people stewarding and maintaining these projects are talented enough to be earning wages that are much further into the outliers (i.e. FANG compensation of 300-400k+/year).
That's all I'm saying. What's much more likely to be happening here is that the maintainer of Babel took a much harder job that cannot be summarized by output metrics like GitHub activity tracking.
Attacking him and essentially tossing around accusations of embezzlement when you've just received VC funding for a competitor is just wrong.
yes, context does matter. So why are you comparing a full time OSS developer with FANG? ridiculous. I don't have any opinion on the babel drama, but 130K isn't a "joke" even for a OSS developer who is "senior".
I'm comparing the salaries because the person is qualified to do either job. Someone turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain OSS, and then is accused of embezzlement by someone who left for FANG salaries and VC-backing.
Yea, tbh this is 100% my read on this situation. Wouldn't go near the dude or his work after this. Spent way too long at Facebook where no one ever has to sell a product and now doesn't understand at all how money works.
The article doesn't even discuss benchmarking Ruby against other languages, so I'm not really sure what you're on about. Couldn't resist taking a performance jab at Rails?
Also, I'll take "double the hardware specs" if it means I'm actually able to focus on what I'm building and not dicking around with devops or rebuilding all of stuff Rails metaprograms for me by hand.
If there was a framework for being as productive as Rails at half the cost then it would be flourishing. There isn't and as a result Rails isn't going anywhere any time soon.
> Also, I'll take "double the hardware specs" if it means I'm actually able to focus on what I'm building and not dicking around with devops or rebuilding all of stuff Rails metaprograms for me by hand.
Try 7x to 11x. That's the amount of reduced RAM usage -- and the amount of increased accommodated users -- on identical hosting by the two apps I rewrote from Rails to Phoenix.
> If there was a framework for being as productive as Rails at half the cost then it would be flourishing.
Bold of you to assume technical merit is the only factor. Historically this has almost never been true. There are a number of web frameworks that perform much better than Rails and are quite easy to work with.
Cargo culting is a powerful force. Corporate inertia -- even more.
And yet Phoenix hasn't stolen a significant amount of market share from Rails.
> There are a number of web frameworks that perform much better than Rails
If you're measuring hardware loads and busting out your stopwatch to measure response times, then sure.
Bottom line is, there are plenty of good reasons to choose Rails over Phoenix. If you want to label choosing a well-backed framework with an incredibly mature ecosystem "cargo culting" then by all means.
Have fun writing Ecto queries by hand, wiring up document storage on your own, trying to find a standout auth library of choice like devise, finding a library that makes managing database views less of a pain, wiring up end-to-end system testing.
I'll be over here running rails new, wiring up sidekiq to ActiveJob, and building shit with ease.
> And yet Phoenix hasn't stolen a significant amount of market share from Rails.
I thought we all learned popularity does not correlate with quality. It correlates pretty closely with corporate inertia and perceived lower risk of developer churn though. Businesses love tech stack for which there are bigger pools of programmers. Says nothing of the quality of the stacks.
> If you're measuring hardware loads and busting out your stopwatch to measure response times, then sure.
Needlessly snarky. Response times matter in a lot of businesses. Count yourself lucky that it hasn't been an important metric in your work.
> Have fun writing Ecto queries by hand
I do have fun writing those. Most times the code in my functions ends up more readable than the equivalent Rails code I wrote years ago. There are some exceptions where you have to dig deeper. Haven't seen a framework -- Rails included -- that lets you handle all complex cases with zero deeper digging needed. At one point you do have to understand SQL and query optimizations, no ways around it.
> wiring up document storage on your own
What for?
> trying to find a standout auth library of choice like devise
It's called Pow and works very well. Additionally, Elixir's maintainers themselves are authoring such a library at the moment.
> finding a library that makes managing database views less of a pain
We can argue if this is a good thing until the Sun explodes. It really depends on the business. I have consulted for businesses where it was very important and true enough, using a library that's well-tuned for classic web apps (like Ecto and ActiveRecord) isn't the best idea there.
> wiring up end-to-end system testing
For 3.5 years with Elixir this is the first time I hear that this is a problem. Any data to back this up?
> I'll be over here running rails new, wiring up sidekiq to ActiveJob, and building shit with ease.
More power to you. Rails is excellent for an MVP or a prototype and this is well-known. It's what comes after is what has burned me out of it. Its maintenance burden is much higher than many others, including PHP's Laravel.
> For 3.5 years with Elixir this is the first time I hear that this is a problem. Any data to back this up?
My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?), and that difference in philosophy is the core of what I'm getting at. With rails new I'm getting an end-to-end test suite and chrome driver installation for free.
Phoenix also has no plans of implementing something similar to ActiveStorage do they? How about ActiveJob now that elixir developers have rediscovered how great a queueing system is with the adoption of Oban?. Will Phoenix ever make a move to include something like ActionText?
They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator.
The Rails team is much quicker and happier to extract something out of the companies supporting it (Basecamp, GitHub, Shopify, etc) and include it directly in the framework, whereas the Phoenix team seems much less willing to take a "batteries" included approach.
There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior". The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use, and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality).
What's easier for someone to learn?
rails g model article title body user:references
mix phx.gen.html Content Article articles title body
I understand what they're going for here, but I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it. If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter.
> If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter.
It's gonna be tough for them really, even if it's a great framework (I have no idea). Elixir didn't take off like Golang or other languages from the last decade. It seems to have quite the learning curve, so for beginners any of ruby / php or even .net / java will make much more sense. For seniors...idk. Not everyone like functional programming. I do hear praise for the language I can't deny it and what seems like a tiny but vibrant community, but the numbers are just not there.
I hope Elixir can maintain it's niche and not outright die just because I know some people rely on it for their pay check but honestly I'm not sure if we'll still have these discussions 5 years from now.
Fringe tech is usually a secret weapon in consulting, or, more rarely (but still happening quite a bit), in a full-time job.
Apples to oranges.
Erlang existed for 30 years and has been used by its small-ish but also very vibrant community, with great success.
So you know, very popular or not, us the people who use it successfully commercially will keep doing so.
But as I have said in the past, if Rust (or OCaml, or any statically strongly typed language that compiles to native code) gains all the guarantees of the BEAM VM then I'll abandon Elixir the next day.
The people who flocked to Elixir thought it was gonna be the new Node / Rails. They're now finding out it's definitely not gonna be either of those things. It remains to be seen if they love it enough to stick around, or will we see a silent churn to the new hotness or even back to Ruby.
> My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?)
You put a lot of weight on built-in features of frameworks in your reply. This is not an objective truth and even DHH himself admitted as much -- including in his article "Rails is Omakase" which I very much enjoyed (because he says that the Rails team picks what they deem the best ingredients and if you disagree then you are not the target audience).
You find value in "officially vetted" libraries, I find value in being assemble to assemble my chair the way I want it to, with parts I built or bought myself.
Neither practice is superior per se. Let's both admit that.
> They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator.
Honest question: how many tech stacks even allow for that? Does Ruby have bytecode instrumentation on the level of, say, the JVM? (Java's instrumentation has unlocked it some quite impressive code generation and runtime code analysis abilities.)
Generating boilerplate is pretty easy. But how many tools out there can scan your code and tell you "this looks like Devise's boilerplate with exceptions in files A and B on lines 123 to 150 and 201 to 217"?
If Rails can do that I'd be very impressed. It couldn't, as far as I was aware, about 4 years ago.
> There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior".
I never said this was important to me. I value Elixir's hassle-free parallelism and concurrency (which is more than what can be said about 99% of the tech out there where those things are always an afterthought). And Elixir is still pretty easy to use. I don't see why both things have to be presented as opponents? Seems like a false dichotomy.
> The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use
You have spoken to the authors and they have told you this, in these exact words?
> ...and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality)
And you have spoken with the Phoenix team. And they told you this. Exactly this?
No. They don't do that. They don't want to steer developers in the direction they might deem the best (they said as much on ElixirForum). They give you freedom to choose. And the community has provided alternative approaches for a number of the classic building blocks of a web app. That's all there is to it and I am not sure how you managed to so grossly misrepesent it. :(
I also never said anything about dogmatically perfect being important (much less correlated to quality!). You are projecting and we are talking past each other which doesn't help the discussion at all. If I cared about purity or similar concepts in the "dogmatically perfect" lane I'd go for Haskell or even Idris. Elixir -- and thus Phoenix -- are very far from "pure", "dogmatically perfect" or any such other academic ideals.
Really not sure where you got that from?
> What's easier for someone to learn?
This is extremely subjective and varies from person to person. Are you claiming that Rails' way is factually superior to learn? To me both are quite straightforward and both require you to have learned some concepts beforehand. And both aren't exactly English with which you command the machine, no?
> If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter.
Ever since I dropped off the mainstream tech train and started working on the sidelines I've noticed something extremely curious which is happening very consistently: the people who work with mainstream tech always assume that the smaller community wants more adoption.
There have been a number of discussions on ElixirForum about this and various important figures of the maintainers' teams have openly said that they aren't aiming to make the language and its stack more popular; they want to make useful tech. One example is the recent Phoenix 1.5.0 release which now comes integrated with LiveView. A lot of people apparently don't want to deal with JS because at least 50% of the new posts on the forum since the announcement have asked exclusively about LiveView.
So again, the maintainers aim to make useful tech, not to trend on Twitter, dev.to, StackOverflow, or anywhere else really.
---
This became rather long. I apologise for that but still wanted to address several misconceptions that seem to have arisen in this discussion.
> the people who work with mainstream tech always assume that the smaller community wants more adoption
We all wanna get paid in the end of the day. Lots of Rails devs got spooked that 5 years from now their knowledge will go to shit. A lot of them still feel insecure about the state of Ruby, even with 90B companies like Shopify using it, because they read a blog about how a startup no one heard of migrated from Rails to Elixir. You don't seem to care about any of that and that's great. But let's face it, a lot of the back and forth "what's better tech" wars and shitting on each other's stacks is simply trying (maybe subconsciously) to gain more adoption and to validate our choices in life, and feel good about what we do by feeling superior to others. Just like a religion really or any other form of community. These aren't really academic discussion on what's "better" in my view.
But I am not here to argue what most do. The discussion here, at least from my part, was to encourage someone to give an alternative tech a try. I did, I kept paying my bills with Rails but got intrigued, became better and better with Elixir, rewrote some stuff in it, demonstrated actual hosting savings (and reports being generated in 7 minutes as opposed to 3 hours with the Rails code) and the rest is history.
Even though you and me keep exchanging jabs here I'd like this to stop.
I don't intend to "shit" on anyone's tech choice. What I did and still do intend is to help somebody, here and there, to love their job. I've met a lot of miserable Java and Ruby on Rails devs.
For the sake of the civil discussion we both should stop assuming stuff.
I am grown up enough to not care about validation (and I think everybody shouldn't care about it either but it's not the world we live in, sadly). It's mostly about finding something that clicks better with your brain and gives you a peace of mind while working.
Rails didn't give me that. It gave me anxiety. I had to always be on watch what is shifting beneath my feet. A [mostly] FP tech stack gives you back the control to shoot your own foot as opposed to a library that's a dependency of the dependency of the library you need doing it. Okay? :)
> We all wanna get paid in the end of the day.
Well, exactly. But I also want to be happy while receiving a paycheck.
> Neither practice is superior per se. Let's both admit that.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to pick the parts yourself. But that comes at a cost and that was my original point that you responded to. Rails makes these decisions for you.
Elixir and Phoenix have taken a different approach, and there's nothing wrong with that. But let's not pretend that Phoenix is "as productive" as Rails. It isn't by choice. I disagree with that choice, but it's not my choice to make.
> Generating boilerplate is pretty easy. But how many tools out there can scan your code and tell you "this looks like Devise's boilerplate with exceptions in files A and B on lines 123 to 150 and 201 to 217"?
Rails can reverse just about every generator that it ships with. I'm guessing it's more difficult in Phoenix because the generators append stuff into contexts instead of generating new files maybe?
> and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality)
>> And you have spoken with the Phoenix team. And they told you this. Exactly this? No. They don't do that.
>> There have been a number of discussions on ElixirForum about this and various important figures of the maintainers' teams have openly said that they aren't aiming to make the language and its stack more popular; they want to make useful tech
What? I feel like you're in agreement and disagreeing with me simultaneously here?
> Are you claiming that Rails' way is factually superior to learn?
No, I'm claiming that Rails is easier to learn and use because of the philosophy of its creators and maintainers. ActiveRecord is easier to use than Ecto. Reversible generators is an easier interface than "just undo it with git". Running a rails command for installing ActiveStorage is easier than building it yourself. ActiveJob is easier than wiring up Oban (not much easier, but still). Getting an end-to-end test framework out of the box is easier than hunting down elixir libraries and trying to bring them to the party.
Rails cares deeply about the developer experience. I think Phoenix does as well, but they focus on different things (LiveView).
This is what I have been told by a former Rails dev who is now doing Laravel. He said that Rails has much more automatically injected code that behaves in a way you can't anticipate intuitively (and many libraries encourage and extend that behaviour). As a former Rails dev myself I agree with that part.
But isn't this exactly what Symfony users accuse Laravel of - too much magic? Laravel's facades are as magical as anything in Rails and Laravel does a lot of code injection. It takes more than one man's opinion to establish a truth.
Another point worth mentioning is that Elixir is only optimised for lightweight processes. If you have to do any heavy lifting you're better off with Go or a JVM language, not Elixir. Forget math with Elixir too - it doesn't even have an arrary/vector data structure of its own. Instead it relies on Erlang's hacky implementation.
Contrary to what you and others try and insinuate, we are very aware that the language is not a universal tech.
So yet again, you guys are smacking at a strawman that's very easy to beat. It's quite tiring to argue with stuff that I never said (and most of Elixir's community haven't said it either). But I think I'll give up for now. :)
That's not been my experience. Whenever I have mentioned the lack of arrays/vectors in the past I have been inundated with Elixir devotees asking me why I need them when Elixir has maps with numeric keys at which point I just throw up my hands in despair.
It's not charitable to make assumptions for the entire community -- or the tech stack itself -- based on them however.
Seems like you've been chatting with the wrong people. A lot of the ElixirForum regulars -- me included -- are very practical and realistic folk who use several languages all the time.
This is putting words in the mouths of other people and is close to a flame bait. (Not to mention your gross generalization of the members of a not-small community.)
1. The Elixir community doesn't seem to aim for popularity (at least several important maintainers have said so on ElixirForum).
2. The tech is useful, scales very well and helps with the hosting costs by using less resources. That's an objective fact, proven in many blog posts where people sat down and measured.
3. Concurrency and parallelism are extremely important and will get more and more important as our CPUs can't get faster single-core performance and are just getting more cores.
It's OK if you don't care about any of those things. Really. I personally never got offended if something I like is disliked by others (as we should all).
But making a strawman and then crushing it is not a productive way to discuss either.
> The Elixir community doesn't seem to aim for popularity (at least several important maintainers have said so on ElixirForum).
Wow, then why does every Rails thread has an Elixir guy trying to tell us what an inferior software we're running? For the sake of humanity?
> and will get more and more important as our CPUs can't get faster single-core performance and are just getting more cores.
I don't think it will become more important in web dev world than it is now. We're here churning out back office CRUD apps like crazy, I don't know what you're doing.
For a small team trying to get something up and running this really doesn't matter and that's what Rails is optimised for. If scale ever matters, if you scale that big, you probably already have the resources to deal with it.
For the few startups that have huge scale + have very scarce resources and Elixir works well for them - great! I have no issues with that at all.
> Wow, then why does every Rails thread has an Elixir guy trying to tell us what an inferior software we're running? For the sake of humanity?
If you prefer that melodramatic phrase. I've been a Rails dev for 6 years and I know that many current Rails devs don't dare try something else -- call it a survivorship bias, fear to abandon what pays the bills now, habits, and most of the time you won't be wrong.
Every now and then I speak with some of them and we exchange ideas.
And you should stop stereotyping, it's juvenile and definitely has no place in HN.
> I know that many current Rails devs don't dare try something else
OK, and I'm the one generalising yes? Clearly you have zero bias towards the Rails devs.
How about simply becoming really good in a skill instead of jumping stacks every 5 years? To REALLY become good in Rails, to the point where you can write gems for activerecord for example that do something cool with arel, or follow the work Tenderlove is doing easily, this type of good takes effort. and time. Some people don't care at all and will happily switch and rebuild that expertise (or will never become experts in anything). That's totally fine.
I value expertise, and won't make the switch for something that on the surface doesn't look like will benefit me at all (again, concurrency as it is in Rails is just fine for my career path and I think most Rails devs are on the same boat).
No I haven't. I'm not on a constant chase to find the better tech. I wanna write good code and come back in the end of the day to eat dinner with my wife. Even if Elixir is objectively better for web development than Rails (which I highly doubt), I wouldn't necessarily want to invest the effort in learning it.
What's so interesting in learning 10 different ways of writing yet another CRUD app? Some people get a kick out of it. These people don't have kids lol.
When my small SaaS customer calls and asks for an extra extension at current hard times, then all I need is to open up Rails production console (pry) and live type in an ad-hoc code with auto-completion aid:
$ rails c
Loading production environment (Rails 5.2.0)
[1] pry(main)> s = Subscriber.find_by_email('[email protected]')
=> #<Subscriber:0x000055dbb64c3bb8
id: 12913,
email: "[email protected]",
state: "active",
expires_on: Fri, 15 May 2020 14:10:19 UTC +00:00,
...
[2] pry(main)> s.expires_on += 2.months
=> Wed, 15 Jul 2020 14:10:19 UTC +00:00
[3] pry(main)> s.save!
=> true
